


The Corners of the World

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Backstory, Calormen, Creation, Dark Magic, Elemental Magic, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gap Filler, Gen, Geography, Islands, Magic, Practicality, Pride, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Tash is not Aslan's devil; Jadis is, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-12
Updated: 2013-09-12
Packaged: 2017-12-26 09:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For nigh on a thousand years after the Lion planted the poison tree in Narnia, Jadis bided her time, exploring her new world's outer reaches and sowing disaster for the green land at its heart -- aka, what Jadis did between <em>The Magician's Nephew</em> and <em>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</em>, as told in four geographic sections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Corners of the World

**Author's Note:**

> I started this story back in 2009, as an attempted response to a Femgenficathon prompt. The story I ended up writing that year was [Little Sister](http://edenfalling.dreamwidth.org/408452.html), which is about the connection between Jadis and the Lady of the Green Kirtle. "The Corners of the World" bears the same chronological relationship to "Little Sister" that LWW bears to HHB -- in other words, the entirety of "Little Sister" takes place within the last few paragraphs of "The Corners of the World."
> 
> Originally I meant for this fic to have five sections and also deal with the immediate aftermath of Jadis's conquest of Narnia, but that turned out to be unwritable as planned. I may do a separate fic on that time period someday, but today is not that day and this is not that story.

**I. North**

For nigh on a thousand years after the Lion planted the poison tree in Narnia, Jadis bided her time, exploring her new world's outer reaches and sowing disaster for the green land at its heart.

She began by traveling north into the moors and mountains. At first she expected to encounter the Lion at every turn, but he remained absent, his power only noticeable in the aftereffects of his attention. And so far as she could tell, he had not paid much attention to the north. The land was desolate and unpeopled, bar a few wandering clans of giants.

Jadis took advantage of the isolation. She rounded up one pack of giants and discovered them to be dimwitted and ignorant creatures, unworthy of receiving acknowledgment as her distant cousins. Nevertheless, she taught them to cut stone. "Build me a tower," she said. "As you work, you will learn the skill to build shelters for yourselves, better than drafty caves or ragged tents."

She waited through the subsequent violent argument as the chieftain's pride and refusal to serve ran headlong into his followers' desire for warmth and security. When the giants' former chieftain lay crushed on the frozen earth, Jadis smiled.

The next summer she taught her new followers to farm. Tending crops in the harsh northern climate required so much labor that they had no time or strength left to bother her.

Jadis shut herself in her tower and spent three score years cataloguing the differences in her magic between this world and her former home. Implementation, she decided, was key. Her old magic was based on words that shaped the power inherent in Lilith's line. Here, magic worked through a connection with the world itself: a person could only affect those aspects or elements of this universe for which she had a natural affinity. Fortunately Jadis had been present for the birth of the world. It had formed around her, giving her a tenuous affinity for all its faces. But she found that she required several days and intense concentration to manipulate anything other than ice.

She spent a full day contemplating the frozen crystalline form of an eagle that had ventured too close to her tower window, wondering if she would have acquired an affinity for flames if she had traveled south from the Lion's garden rather than north, or if ice spoke some truth of her soul. Then she laughed and dismissed the question. Ice was fearsome when properly wielded, and she could shape tools to more readily channel other aspects of the world.

Now certain in her strength and immortality, Jadis left her tower. Her giants had built a squalid village in the past decades and were engaged in intermittent battles with a more nomadic tribe from the next valley to the east. She left them to play at war and began to explore the limits of this desolate land.

She summoned a reindeer -- a dumb beast, though it minded her well enough -- and rode north. After a score of leagues, the mountains gave way to a flat, frozen plain, inhabited by nothing but ghostly white bears who clustered near the coast. Jadis rode her mount across the plain toward a still higher range of mountains. They rose snowcapped and knife-sharp on the horizon, and seemed to grow the closer she came to their feet, rising faster and higher than the curvature of the world could explain. The stars that shone between their peaks were bright and foreign, and did not circle the sky as others did. Jadis tasted magic in the wind that blew from their flanks, and smiled hungrily.

The reindeer died of starvation at the base of a night-black cliff. Jadis left its corpse to freeze and began to climb. She fell and slipped. Her hands bled. The wind and snow scoured her face and bones whiter and colder than even the apple of immortality had done.

Always the mountains rose higher before her, yearning toward the stars. Jadis grew short of breath. Then she could not breathe at all; the mountains had pierced the very sky and the winds of the heavens were anathema to her, laced with the scent of the poison tree. And still she could not see the mountains' peaks.

She could not pass. The Lion had barred the way.

Jadis rested her head on the stones and whispered into the stinging wind, yoking its icy will to her own so it would repeat her words for year upon year, until they reached the Lion's ears. "Do you think me so easily defeated? Do you think me as weak and foolish as your dupes? Though it take a thousand thousand years, I will make this world mine. I will break free from its bounds and make _all_ the worlds mine. Wherever you have traveled, whatever you have made, whomever you have touched: I claim it all. I will ruin everything you love. I will destroy you. This I swear by the death of Charn."

Jadis opened her hands and fell through chasms of air and silence.

The snow caught her with gentle arms at the mountains' feet. She carved a curse into the black cliff in her own tongue, the language of Charn, and enchanted the letters to remain sharp and unblurred until this world's ending.

She took a jagged splinter of ebon rock as a reminder of her vow and began to walk south.

The seasons had turned while she climbed. The frozen, featureless plain had thawed into a maze of shallow bogs, covered by a blanket of birds and a netting of weeds. Hawks and foxes had joined the white bears, making a rich living off this strange land during the brief, violent summer. It was a country suitable only for vermin and mad hunters. Its magic was the harshness of death, the bite of darkness and cold. Jadis knew those powers inside and out.

But she did not understand this world. Not yet, not in full. Jadis turned the splinter of stone over in her hands, pricked her fingers on its razor edges, and decided to explore the earth.

She returned to her tower and found giants living in its lower stories. She turned them to ice. Then she shattered the frozen statues.

"I am as far above you as the stars are above the earth," she told the survivors. "If you touch what is mine, you shall suffer the consequences."

The giants cowered and wept. They called her queen and goddess. And they showed her the caves in which they had lived before she came among them.

Jadis crafted a sheath for her splinter of stone and marched into the darkness of the earth. At first this new quest seemed more productive than her travels aboveground -- she found caverns of monstrous wonders, frozen blooms of metal and jewels, a vast and sunless sea, and many other marvels -- but she grew bored of the dark reaches. Stone moved at a pace slower even than immortal life, and Jadis had no patience to fathom its secrets.

She needed to travel further, to learn more of the Lion's mind. She needed to understand this world so thoroughly that she could see the gaps in its weaving, the places where she might step through to another universe. She would gather all the worlds like pearls on a string and bind the Lion out as he had bound her in.

When she returned to the sunlit lands after two score years in the dark, Jadis discovered that her giants and their eastern rivals had made alliance in order to attack the richer lands to the south. Jadis would never have tolerated such strife between provinces in Charn, but in this world she had no equals to cow, nor any traditions to uphold. All chaos would rebound on the Lion and his pet country, not upon her. And she had always found battles pleasing.

She gave the giants her blessing. "You are cousins of the blood royal of Charn," she told them, "debased and diluted, but kin nonetheless. This world is spread before you for the taking. Go, then, and claim your birthright."

She laughed at the thought of the war she had set in motion, of the suffering and loss that awaited Narnia. Then she appropriated a single-mast fishing boat from a coastal village in the path of the giants' army and set sail into the eastern ocean.

\---------------

**II. East**

The nearest islands and archipelagos had already been settled by sailors or peasant refugees from other worlds. Jadis landed at sunset on Galma, dragged her boat up the sand, and slipped into the settlers' main town at noon the next day. The town itself was squalid and insignificant, a mere heap of half-timbered houses arranged in haphazard streets and hunched behind a wall of sharpened stakes. There were no predators larger than foxes on the island. The only purpose of the wall was to mark territory -- to ward off other humans.

Jadis smiled at the persistent folly of Eve's brood, eternally twisting and writhing on hooks forged by their own jealousy and fear. Then she settled in at a corner of their market and began to tell stories. Her first audience was a pack of ragged children, useful only as a signal to their elders and bait to attract their parents. Jadis spun a foolish tale about Lilith's daughter Innenya, who climbed the spiral stairs down to the sunless lands, to pry the secret of death from the hands of jealous gods. She told the story of Gerathis and her brother Joyan, who followed a falling star and founded the city of Charn where the messenger of heaven touched the earth. She adopted a more solemn air and related her own grandmother's life as if it were an ancient tragedy: Queen Nekoris, betrayed and killed by her own son, but then avenged by her granddaughters who restored her kingdom to its rightful glory.

Jadis paused and inspected her audience. Nearly two score humans, almost half of them full grown. Time to lay the poison. "Enough of old legends," she said. "Let us talk of this world, our new home. I see you are making this island your own. Have you also sailed to the mainland? Have you seen the riches that lie there for the taking?"

Most said no. A few said yes.

"Why have you not settled there?" Jadis asked the people of Galma. "Why are you forced to scratch out a living on this island, fighting its thin soil, its winter storms, its treacherous tides? Ah, but I forget," she said, raising a hand before anyone could interrupt. "You are men. Narnia is not a country for men."

One of the humans who had sailed to the mainland made a peculiar gesture with his hands, tucking his inner fingers against his palm and pointing at the ground with the outer fingers. There was no magic in the motion, but Jadis recognized a warding sign when she saw one.

"You know what I speak of," she said, pointing to the superstitious man. "You have seen the demons in the shape of beasts that hold that country under their spell. Imagine, if you will, the dogs who herd your flocks or the cats who guard your storehouses, grown to twice their natural size and given unnatural cunning to speak with the tongues of men. They say this is their world, created by a spirit in the shape of a Lion with fangs and talons and an endless hunger for blood. Any who wish to live on the mainland and take their share of its bounty must bow and sacrifice to that beast in secret, bloodstained rites."

The crowd shifted, murmuring, caught between disbelief, disquiet, and shameless, greedy interest. Humans spoke of souls and goodness, but their true nature was nothing but selfish hunger and glee at others' misfortune.

That was useful. Jadis used it.

"The beasts claim that humans are welcome among them, but the first human traitors to settle there -- the ones the beasts called king and queen in jest and mockery -- married their children either to each other or to those selfsame beasts, and now their children are incestuous monsters or tainted halflings," she said. "So would all your children be, if you tried to live there. You would teach them the right way of things, but always the beasts would whisper lies in their ears, tempting them to folly and madness."

Jadis shrugged, flicking one snow-scoured hand as if dismissing the topic. "You are wise and you do not deal with the beasts. You are also lucky, that they have not turned their eyes eastward to see what you are building here. They are envious creatures, the Narnians, and they claim the whole world is theirs by right of inheritance from the terrible Lion. But you have been blessed thus far and I trust you will remain so. Now. Let me tell you of the giants in the north..."

She remained on Galma for a handful of days, spinning legends and children's tales from Charn in return for food, shelter, and a handful of coins. Whenever anyone asked, she repeated her description of Narnia and the Lion. Few people offered public support to her stories, but few condemned her either. And as always among humans, dark whispers began to circulate in secret, doubling and redoubling into a coiled serpent of envy and fear, waiting only for a goal at which to aim and a signal to strike.

When the first human mentioned the possibility of building a warship -- for defense, of course, only for defense! -- Jadis knew her work was done. She converted her new store of coins into provisions and set sail for the next island.

She repeated the pattern in Terebinthia, in the Seven Isles, and in the Lone Islands. Then she sailed further eastward, past the humans' charts. There were new lands to discover, new details to gather about the Lion's mind.

As with the north, the Lion seemed not to have thought about the ocean in detail, or at least not the inhabitable portions. Jadis set her stone splinter at the prow of her boat and navigated by its pull, aiming sure and certain toward one island after another. She found each new land untouched, still brimful with the potential of the first days of creation, waiting to be given form and direction.

The Lion had abandoned his work half-finished. Jadis would complete it for him, though not in the shapes and patterns he would have chosen.

Jadis recalled the legends she had spent the past months spreading among the islanders. She herself had no use for tales of fantastical lands beyond the horizon, but her sister had always been fond of stories. Cynara had used her collection of tales and proverbs to make nobles and peasants alike think that she was approachable, that because she shared a handful of legends with her subjects, she would be willing to let them sway her decisions now and then. That friendly warmth had been a threadbare veil over the ravenous fire of her true nature, but it had fooled enough of the army to let Cynara win the conventional phase of her war with Jadis.

Cynara was long dead, but Jadis remembered the stories her sister had told and retold, practicing on Jadis until she had the words and timing perfect. Now that Jadis found herself in a world that truly did have edges, she amused herself by breathing life into the more dangerous stories, twisting the Lion's world to her own devices. Cynara had pushed Jadis to destroy a universe. Jadis honored that strength by weaving her sister's memory into the bones of a new world.

"Here there be dragons," Jadis said to one island, and fire-breathing lizards crawled from the stones, cunning and ravenous. "Here the sirens lure children to their deaths," she said to the next, "every two score years." The trick only worked if people had time to forget and settle the land anew. Lightning struck the sea and an eerie, haunting song arose from the reflected light before the newborn sirens slipped beneath the waves.

"Here men shall find their hearts' desire and thus despair," Jadis said to a third island, and the frogs and flowers in one of its springs died instantly, turned to solid gold. She dipped a handful of twigs into the water before she returned to the sea; money might be useful later on. "Here dreams come true," she said to a fourth isle, and smiled as a miasma of darkness seeped from what had been rich and fertile earth, spreading over the water until she raised her hand and set a boundary on her spell.

Jadis sailed onward. "Here are little men," she said, but didn't linger to see what became of the tiny, quarrelsome creatures. "Here is eternal slumber," she said to a low, purple island, where she paused and landed to restore her stocks of water, for even eternal life does not negate thirst or hunger forever. 

Unlike the other isolated isles, she discovered, this last land had already been partially shaped. A long stone table sat in the middle of an open colonnade, set with a sumptuous feast. Jadis sniffed the air warily. This reeked of the Lion's magic, as did the strange bright stars on the eastern horizon. But her own magic had coiled tendrils around this place as well and she had never cared about the Lion's rules.

She sat at the head of the table and ate with a will, slaking the hunger and thirst that had nagged at her for nearly a fortnight. Then she parted the earth of a nearby hill, carving out a small chamber, and gathered the napkins and tablecloth to cushion her rest.

When she woke to the horrible shrieking of a thousand birds as they flew from the east and descended upon the Lion's table, the fabric had turned to dust beneath her. Jadis pressed her hands to her ears and glared hatefully until the creatures departed. They had woken her from enchanted slumber, but they were the Lion's creatures and their cries would not have reached her ears unless he wished them to. He had twisted her own spell to lull her into sleep and chosen the moment of her waking, mocking her as vulnerable and weak.

Obviously she had much more to learn before she could take her vengeance.

Jadis dragged her ship back out into the surf and began to sail westward, tacking against the wind. Somehow she knew this was the last island. Everything further east belonged to the Lion and she could not touch it, just as she could not cross the northern mountains. Not yet. Not until she unlocked the secrets of his power.

\---------------

**III. South**

Jadis beat her way westward against the wind until she reached the island of little men. They had set up camp on the southern shore, where a small stream wound its way down to a sandy beach. Jadis struck inland to the water's source, refilled her barrels, and settled into the grove around the spring to wait. The wind would change after the solstice, bringing storms and snow from the northeast; she could feel the promise of winter in her bones.

She waited until equinox -- strange, that this bounded world with its singing stars and air-filled heavens would mimic the patterns of a globe spinning round a proper sun -- before resuming her journey. She retraced her path through the settled islands, reinforcing the growth of their xenophobia and whispering of the wondrous lands to the east. Then she turned her boat to the southwest, skirting the shores of Narnia to avoid its poisoned air.

She sailed southward, past wooded mountains and a sandy desert, until she found a thriving port at the mouth of a great river. Its inhabitants were of a different race from the stocky, pallid islanders. The Calormenes, as they called themselves, were tall and dark, slim and proud. They had discovered or remembered war on their own, Jadis learned as she eavesdropped on gossip in the marketplace, and were divided into a dozen tiny, squabbling nations, of which this city-state -- Tashbaan -- was currently the strongest.

She told stories for coins again, but the Calormenes were uninterested in tales of Narnia and the Lion. The north held nothing but barbarians and outlaws, some scores of whom had stumbled south across the desert two generations ago and quickly been driven into the uninhabited west when they had tried to take this land for their own. 

The Calormenes had their own concerns, their own gods. First they would unite the south, the people of Tashbaan told Jadis, and extend the worship of inexorable Tash, god of war and judgment, to the benighted fools who claimed that one of the other gods -- maybe benevolent Garshomon, god of rivers and grain; or impetuous Sokda, god of wind and storms; or silent Azaroth, god of darkness and death -- was king of heaven. Second they would look west and conquer the descendants of the pale-skinned barbarians. Only once their own house was in order would they turn their swords against the pitiful nations beyond the wasteland that guarded their northern flanks.

Jadis curled her hand around her splinter of stone until her palm bled from its razor edges, but she held her peace. Rage would be counterproductive, and deep in the hidden corners of her heart she admired the Calormenes' practicality. She understood them. They were not blood-kin, like the giants, but they were empire builders. They were strong.

She could work with that.

The prince of Tashbaan had recently declared war on the upriver city of Habad, whose people claimed that melancholy Nur, god of scholars and disease, reigned supreme in heaven. Jadis insinuated herself into the palace on pretext of selling information about the growing war-fleets of the islands. When she was brought before the prince, she cast aside her mask of humility and faced him as his superior, empress to petty royalty.

"You are a fool," she told the prince. "You fight only one enemy at a time, and when you have forced him to submit and pay tribute, you let him retain power in his own city so he recovers and schemes against you once more. That is no way to build an empire that will last until the world's end. That is no way to honor your god."

The prince signaled for his guards to seize her. Jadis laughed as she turned one to ice. She stabbed the other with her splinter of stone, and hid her astonishment when his body turned gray and hard as granite. "You cannot touch me," she told the prince. "I am as far beyond your power as the eastern sea is distant from the western wild. But I will give you advice, for my amusement. Listen if you are wise."

The prince knelt before his throne and did not contradict his advisors when they called her a goddess -- Acharith, queen of winter and the eclipse, lady of all things uncanny and out of place. He promised to do whatsoever she wished, but Jadis saw rage and cunning in the depths of his eyes and knew he thought her mortal and planned already to kill her. Good. She wanted him angry, wanted him vengeful. It would be child's play to redirect those emotions toward the Lion.

Jadis went with the prince on his campaign upriver and reordered his battle lines into something stronger and more flexible, involving more engines and feints. This was good land for chariots, as Charn had been; she would introduce those when they took the next city. Spiked wheels and the scream of wind through carefully designed funnels should terrify at least two armies into surrender before word of Tashbaan's new tactics spread.

In the meantime, she forbade the prince to call her a goddess, nor to call her by any name but her own. She was above such petty creatures as gods. She appointed herself his executioner instead and experimented with the strange power of her stone shard.

It seemed to work like her gift with ice: flesh and blood turned to something hard and crystalline in a single breath. But her magic did not bend naturally to stone. Jadis could not replicate the trick without hours of patient concentration and ritual, which were obviously impossible to come by in the middle of battle. The most she managed to do was craft a housing for the shard that would extend its power from contact to line of sight, rather like the blasting spells she had known and used in Charn.

It was galling not to be able to master this new power completely, but power held in a tool was better than no power at all, so long as the tool could neither be lost nor stolen. Jadis laid careful enchantments on her new wand, ensuring that no hand but hers could ever wake its power and that it would always return to her in the end.

Then she took her toy to war.

When the soldiers of Tashbaan looked out upon a battlefield strewn with broken statues, not even Jadis's decree could keep them from naming her a goddess. In exasperation, Jadis summoned the prince to her side and told him she was leaving. "Heaven's favor is not infinite. I have given you what you need to take the world. Your failures from now will be on your own head."

The prince smiled through gritted teeth and offered to ease her way back to her fellow gods with great sacrifices at the main temple of his city. A goddess, he implied, needed a fittingly grand departure, lest rumors spread that she was merely a sorceress and thus vulnerable to treachery in the dark.

Jadis had no fear of human attempts at guile, but it occurred to her that the Calormene gods might know of the Lion and his secrets. It would be wasteful not to summon and interrogate them before she moved on. If they proved strong enough, she might even offer alliance.

"I can and will provide my own sacrifices," she told the prince, but she accepted his offer of an escort to the main temple. It stood to the east of the palace, on the highest point of the island city, and was ringed by tiny shrines to the other gods. Compared to the great temple complexes of Charn, it was pitiful, but this world was young. Perhaps these human gods would be housed in true imperial splendor someday.

Jadis locked the doors behind her with chains of ice and slit her escorts' throats upon the altar.

"I am Jadis, last and greatest Empress of Charn, destroyer of worlds and scourge of the Lion," she said, giving her titles in the form gods tended to expect. "One day I will rend him to pieces, but first I must learn the secret to walking between the worlds that he keeps for himself. Your people are not born of this world; you came from another universe. Tell me how to part the walls between the worlds and I will lay this world at your feet when I depart for other universes."

She expected Tash to appear -- a vulture-headed, multi-armed monstrosity -- but the spirit that tore the air over the altar was shaped like the silhouette of a woman, flickering between midnight black and blinding white. In her left hand she held a spear; in her right, a sickle; and around her waist, a belt of human bones.

"Jadis of Charn, you who have claimed my aspect," the human god said, her voice like honey and razors, "we will not bargain with you. We go where our people go; we and they open ways together. You have no people. You have no world. You are naught but a cancer. If you seek to destroy the shaper of this world, you do so alone."

The goddess flickered forward, her spear stabbing toward Jadis like lightning from a clear blue sky. Despite herself, Jadis closed her eyes against the searing light.

She opened them to empty sand and a thousand stars.

\---------------

**IV. West**

The gods of this world were the same as the gods of Charn: tricksters, imposters, claiming feats of strength and power that were obviously beyond them. They were born from the people who worshipped them, spun from the residual magic of creation and shaped by the patterns of mortal belief. They could not help Jadis divine the Lion's secrets.

But she knew what they evidently did not: the location of the hill and meadow in Narnia where the Lion had sung his spell, and the location of the garden of the Tree of Life. She could not reach the world's heart, but perhaps she could return to the garden. Its stench had not been as powerful or vile as the poison that laced Narnia's air.

Jadis tucked her wand through her belt and began to walk north and west through the desert.

The hills and mountains of the far west were as wild as when she had first passed that way, though this time she was forced to cross them at full length rather than take advantage of the malleability of a world newly born. She could no longer trick the fabric of space into letting her traverse leagues at each step; instead she descended into each valley in its turn and climbed once again to the heights, searching for passes between the ice-shrouded peaks. In compensation, she was now immortal and had no need to stop for sleep or rest. Jadis stalked grimly onward toward the walled garden at the foot of what she suspected was another branch of the world-limiting mountains she had failed to climb in the uttermost north.

All lakes in this land were of a nearly eye-searing blue, no doubt some trick of elevation and glacial sediment, but eventually she reached the one with an unnaturally tall, smooth grassy hill at its far western end.

The poison scent permeated the valley, but it flowed eastward through the gates with their mocking inscription, over the lake, and on toward the rim of the valley. The western slope of the hill was nearly tolerable. Jadis climbed it and the turf wall of the garden.

She could not approach the apple tree in the center of the garden, nor study the mysterious fountain that she regretted not examining more closely during her first visit, nor kill the garishly colored bird that ineffectively guarded the magical fruit. But after a time she put those frustrations out of her mind, for she had found a new curiosity.

Outside the garden, at the base of the hill and across a narrow stream grew a tree unlike any Jadis had seen in this world or her own, though something in the shape of its leaves tugged at a dim memory of the green horror the humans had used as a stepping stone through the void. That place belonged to the Lion, which meant this tree might serve as a conduit for his power.

It looked no larger than an ordinary tree at first, but the closer Jadis came the more it seemed to grow until the gnarl of its roots stretched taller than her head, its bark hung as heavy and thick as stone, and the spread of its braches might have held up the very sky. Words were carved into the trunk, each stroke as broad as her hand and deeper than the reach of her arm. She could not read them. They were not written in the speech of Charn, nor in the barbaric tongue the humans had conspired with the Lion to impose on the fabric of this world.

That was hardly an obstacle.

Jadis laid her hand upon the edge of a letter, where sap still seeped from the gash though the wound breathed age and ought long ago to have healed. She closed her eyes. Those of Lilith's line had always been gifted with understanding. She merely had to wait. She stood through the sunset and the night, motionless as stone, and when at last the sun's light slanted around the looming hill she opened her eyes and read the message the Lion had left to mock her.

The laws of magic she had already learned through trial and observation. The doors that opened inward only, bringing human scum to overrun this world as they had so many others, were irrelevant. The dance and song of the stars was a petty boast, not prophecy, for the future was determined by power and will and Jadis had more than enough of both to bend events as she wished.

But one passage caught her eye, for it mentioned her by name.

 _"Jadis of Charn, she who betrayed the welcome of the world, shall stand as accuser and bane of any who follow in her path. All those who break faith are her lawful prey, and for every treachery she may mete the death that is denied to her. If she should stand in the cradle of the world but be denied her price in blood, all the earth shall be overturned and perish in fire and water,"_ Jadis read. The words fell easily from her tongue in her native speech, for they echoed one of Charn's oldest laws, attributed to Lilith All-Mother herself, who in recompense for the twin betrayals of Adam and his nameless god had woven the right of judgment into her blood and that of all her line, until the end of the world.

So the Lion would make Jadis his hangman, then hobble her with that same rope? He would charge her to enforce the law of Charn in a land from which his own law had barred her? How _dare_ he? Jadis raised her hand, ice crackling between her fingers. Then she paused.

No. This was not the Lion's taunt. This law was carved into the living heart of the world, in the speech the fallow earth had dreamed for itself in the eons before meddling humans had stumbled into waiting darkness and disturbed the air with their harsh, foreign words. Set against that kind of power, the poisoned magic exiling Jadis from Narnia was rooted in mere windblown dust.

What was a tree but arrogance waiting to fall? Jadis could not cut down Narnia's shield herself, but nothing said she could not send others to carry out her will. She was a queen, the greatest magician ever born of Lilith's blood. She had bound an entire world to her will. Binding another was no great trick.

The wind shifted for a moment, wafting the poison scent westward from the garden.

Jadis retreated.

She made camp for the night on a ridge two leagues north of the garden. The next day, she began the painstaking process of bending her power to resonate with stone. She walked a circle around the foundation, a narrow trail of her own blood left on the ground to mark the way. Then she stood in the center of her soon-to-be-tower and wrenched the bones of the earth to her command, thrusting ever higher in an unbroken spiral, unmarred by mason or mortar.

She crowned the spire with ice and waited for its shine to lure the rabble to her door.

When they came -- seeking adventure, treasure, revelation, peace, or any of a hundred irrelevant motives -- Jadis welcomed them in through her gate of ice and iron and made them disappear. Her tower stretched as far below the earth as above, and in the sunless depths she built her soldiers. She had never held the loyalty of the armies as her sister had, but she had stood her ground through years of war because her soldiers were better. Stronger. Faster. Purged of second thoughts and traitorous compassion.

She remade the Lion's creatures in the shape of their nightmares until they were hers: breath, blood, and bone. Wer-wolves and hags, ghouls and ogres, cruels and specters, minotaurs, boggles, and the poisonous people of the toadstools.

Soon her newest guests began to whisper tales of her tower as she worked, naming it the place of forgetting, the pit of bones, the death of hope. Jadis smiled and bound their tongues.

When at last she opened wide her gates and led her army forth, all the wilderness west of Narnia fell helpless at her feet.

Yet the poison tree still stood and kept her from her true victory, an unbroken lock upon the door to all the Lion's secrets. Her underlings did not feel its breath the way she did, but upon consideration, she would not send her army where she could not go herself. Pride forbade that, if nothing else, and she could not risk that her creatures might, in their ignorance, destroy the very secrets she sought. All her work had been for naught.

Jadis left her army to its own devices and traveled north once more. She had found a way around Cynara's power, had learned the deepest secret of Charn and used it without flinching. She would do so again in this new world.

And in the north, by the borders of Harfang where her petty cousins had begun to build a shoddy echo of Charn, a snake showed her the key. Jadis had no equals in this world, not like Cynara, but that did not mean she must go kinless. She could make a new sister, a new heir.

The snake entered Narnia and worked her wiles on the complacent king. The tree fell. The west surged in. Jadis entered Narnia, winter at her heels, the Deep Magic on her side.

She locked the Lion out.


End file.
